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Page added on March 23, 2016
A World War Has Begun
I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”
Few seem aware that the bikini swimsuit was named to celebrate the nuclear explosions that destroyed Bikini island. Sixty-six nuclear devices were exploded by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 — the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs every day for twelve years.
Bikini is silent today, mutated and contaminated. Palm trees grow in a strange grid formation. Nothing moves. There are no birds. The headstones in the old cemetery are alive with radiation. My shoes registered “unsafe” on a Geiger counter.
Standing on the beach, I watched the emerald green of the Pacific fall away into a vast black hole. This was the crater left by the hydrogen bomb they called “Bravo”. The explosion poisoned people and their environment for hundreds of miles, perhaps forever.
On my return journey, I stopped at Honolulu airport and noticed an American magazine called Women’s Health. On the cover was a smiling woman in a bikini swimsuit, and the headline: “You, too, can have a bikini body.” A few days earlier, in the Marshall Islands, I had interviewed women who had very different “bikini bodies”; each had suffered thyroid cancer and other life-threatening cancers.
Unlike the smiling woman in the magazine, all of them were impoverished: the victims and guinea pigs of a rapacious superpower that is today more dangerous than ever.
I relate this experience as a warning and to interrupt a distraction that has consumed so many of us. The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an “invisible government”.
How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.
In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”. People cheered and some cried. A torrent of platitudes flowed from the media. Obama was subsequently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was all fake. He was lying.
The Obama administration has built more nuclear weapons, more nuclear warheads, more nuclear delivery systems, more nuclear factories. Nuclear warhead spending alone rose higher under Obama than under any American president. The cost over thirty years is more than $1 trillion.
A mini nuclear bomb is planned. It is known as the B61 Model 12. There has never been anything like it. General James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, “Going smaller [makes using this nuclear] weapon more thinkable.”
In the last eighteen months, the greatest build-up of military forces since World War Two — led by the United States — is taking place along Russia’s western frontier. Not since Hitler invaded the Soviet Union have foreign troops presented such a demonstrable threat to Russia.
Ukraine – once part of the Soviet Union – has become a CIA theme park. Having orchestrated a coup in Kiev, Washington effectively controls a regime that is next door and hostile to Russia: a regime rotten with Nazis, literally. Prominent parliamentary figures in Ukraine are the political descendants of the notorious OUN and UPA fascists. They openly praise Hitler and call for the persecution and expulsion of the Russian speaking minority.
This is seldom news in the West, or it is inverted to suppress the truth.
In Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — next door to Russia – the US military is deploying combat troops, tanks, heavy weapons. This extreme provocation of the world’s second nuclear power is met with silence in the West.
What makes the prospect of nuclear war even more dangerous is a parallel campaign against China.
Seldom a day passes when China is not elevated to the status of a “threat”. According to Admiral Harry Harris, the US Pacific commander, China is “building a great wall of sand in the South China Sea”.
What he is referring to is China building airstrips in the Spratly Islands, which are the subject of a dispute with the Philippines – a dispute without priority until Washington pressured and bribed the government in Manila and the Pentagon launched a propaganda campaign called “freedom of navigation”.
What does this really mean? It means freedom for American warships to patrol and dominate the coastal waters of China. Try to imagine the American reaction if Chinese warships did the same off the coast of California.
I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I interviewed distinguished journalists in America and Britain: reporters such as Dan Rather of CBS, Rageh Omar of the BBC, David Rose of the Observer.
All of them said that had journalists and broadcasters done their job and questioned the propaganda that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction; had the lies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair not been amplified and echoed by journalists, the 2003 invasion of Iraq might not have happened, and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children would be alive today.
The propaganda laying the ground for a war against Russia and/or China is no different in principle. To my knowledge, no journalist in the Western “mainstream” — a Dan Rather equivalent, say –asks why China is building airstrips in the South China Sea.
The answer ought to be glaringly obvious. The United States is encircling China with a network of bases, with ballistic missiles, battle groups, nuclear -armed bombers.
This lethal arc extends from Australia to the islands of the Pacific, the Marianas and the Marshalls and Guam, to the Philippines, Thailand, Okinawa, Korea and across Eurasia to Afghanistan and India. America has hung a noose around the neck of China. This is not news. Silence by media; war by media.
In 2015, in high secrecy, the US and Australia staged the biggest single air-sea military exercise in recent history, known as Talisman Sabre. Its aim was to rehearse an Air-Sea Battle Plan, blocking sea lanes, such as the Straits of Malacca and the Lombok Straits, that cut off China’s access to oil, gas and other vital raw materials from the Middle East and Africa.
In the circus known as the American presidential campaign, Donald Trump is being presented as a lunatic, a fascist. He is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our scepticism.
Trump’s views on migration are grotesque, but no more grotesque than those of David Cameron. It is not Trump who is the Great Deporter from the United States, but the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama.
According to one prodigious liberal commentator, Trump is “unleashing the dark forces of violence” in the United States. Unleashing them?
This is the country where toddlers shoot their mothers and the police wage a murderous war against black Americans. This is the country that has attacked and sought to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democracies, and bombed from Asia to the Middle East, causing the deaths and dispossession of millions of people.
No country can equal this systemic record of violence. Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.
In 1947, a series of National Security Council directives described the paramount aim of American foreign policy as “a world substantially made over in [America’s] own image”. The ideology was messianic Americanism. We were all Americans. Or else. Heretics would be converted, subverted, bribed, smeared or crushed.
Donald Trump is a symptom of this, but he is also a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted “exceptionalism” is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.
As presidential election day draws near, Clinton will be hailed as the first female president, regardless of her crimes and lies – just as Barack Obama was lauded as the first black president and liberals swallowed his nonsense about “hope”. And the drool goes on.
Described by the Guardian columnist Owen Jones as “funny, charming, with a coolness that eludes practically every other politician”, Obama the other day sent drones to slaughter 150 people in Somalia. He kills people usually on Tuesdays, according to the New York Times, when he is handed a list of candidates for death by drone. So cool.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton threatened to “totally obliterate” Iran with nuclear weapons. As Secretary of State under Obama, she participated in the overthrow of the democratic government of Honduras. Her contribution to the destruction of Libya in 2011 was almost gleeful. When the Libyan leader, Colonel Gaddafi, was publicly sodomised with a knife – a murder made possible by American logistics – Clinton gloated over his death: “We came, we saw, he died.”
One of Clinton’s closest allies is Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of State, who has attacked young women for not supporting “Hillary”. This is the same Madeleine Albright who infamously celebrated on TV the death of half a million Iraqi children as “worth it”.
Among Clinton’s biggest backers are the Israel lobby and the arms companies that fuel the violence in the Middle East. She and her husband have received a fortune from Wall Street. And yet, she is about to be ordained the women’s candidate, to see off the evil Trump, the official demon. Her supporters include distinguished feminists: the likes of Gloria Steinem in the US and Anne Summers in Australia.
A generation ago, a post-modern cult now known as “identity politics” stopped many intelligent, liberal-minded people examining the causes and individuals they supported — such as the fakery of Obama and Clinton; such as bogus progressive movements like Syriza in Greece, which betrayed the people of that country and allied with their enemies.
Self absorption, a kind of “me-ism”, became the new zeitgeist in privileged western societies and signaled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism.
Today, the long sleep may be over. The young are stirring again. Gradually. The thousands in Britain who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader are part of this awakening – as are those who rallied to support Senator Bernie Sanders.
In Britain last week, Jeremy Corbyn’s closest ally, his shadow treasurer John McDonnell, committed a Labour government to pay off the debts of piratical banks and, in effect, to continue so-called austerity.
In the US, Bernie Sanders has promised to support Clinton if or when she’s nominated. He, too, has voted for America’s use of violence against countries when he thinks it’s “right”. He says Obama has done “a great job”.
In Australia, there is a kind of mortuary politics, in which tedious parliamentary games are played out in the media while refugees and Indigenous people are persecuted and inequality grows, along with the danger of war. The government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war. There was no debate. Silence.
What has happened to the great tradition of popular direct action, unfettered to parties? Where is the courage, imagination and commitment required to begin the long journey to a better, just and peaceful world? Where are the dissidents in art, film, the theatre, literature?
Where are those who will shatter the silence? Or do we wait until the first nuclear missile is fired?
This is an edited version of an address by John Pilger at the University of Sydney, entitled A World War Has Begun.
22 Comments on "A World War Has Begun"
Plantagenet on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 1:49 pm
This is guy is just figuring out now that Obama lied about getting rid of nuclear weapons and ending US foreign wars?
Sheesh. Where has he been?
Pennsyguy on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 2:41 pm
It can be difficult to detect lies in the Orwellian Matrix of the Brave New World. There is good news: ignore the propaganda and the lobotomy fades.
peakyeast on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 3:39 pm
“In 2009, President Obama stood before an adoring crowd in the centre of Prague, in the heart of Europe. He pledged himself to make “the world free from nuclear weapons”.”
Obama can still make it in a split second : He just has to push a button.
And concerning the “micro” nukes: Yep – that was what was more important than doing fusion power at NIF – and that was an Obama administration judgement.
I suppose the same can be said about all the too bid to jail and fail – Also an Obama choice. And the prosecution of all whistleblowers. The continuation of automated remote indiscrimate killing done from immature algoritms by drugged up infantile “patriots”. And so on and on and on.
Its a wonder that people can be against Trump – if this is what they adore.
peakyeast on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 4:38 pm
Btw. I recommend John Pilgers documentaries. For example “stealing a nation”.
The government bureaucrats he interviews in that documentary are quite impressive. There are a couple that clearly are total psychos to a degree I have NEVER seen otherwise – not even in fiction movies.
If for nothing else – then watch it to see these “people” being interviewed. They do not even seem to be part of humanity – as broad as that may seem to be.
Repent on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 5:50 pm
I do not like any of them. Elections have become -Choose your sociopath- events, and not much more.
Harquebus on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 6:17 pm
Plantagenet.
John Pilger has been commenting on government lies and misinformation for quite some time.
http://johnpilger.com/
makati1 on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 6:50 pm
If you do not look at, or read, any of the bullshit coming out of the US MSM you can get a good picture of the current state of affairs of the world and the Us. If you are a typical American, you know noting about reality and little history or geography.
“I have been filming in the Marshall Islands, which lie north of Australia, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Whenever I tell people where I have been, they ask, “Where is that?” If I offer a clue by referring to “Bikini”, they say, “You mean the swimsuit.”
Perfect example of American ignorance.
“How many people are aware that a world war has begun? At present, it is a war of propaganda, of lies and distraction, but this can change instantaneously with the first mistaken order, the first missile.”
For example:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2016/03/18/Air-Force-investigates-possible-drug-use-by-troops-protecting-nuclear-weapons/1971458317417/
America, the land of drugs, greed and ignorance. No country deserves what is coming than they. Americans had it all and they blew it on an unsupportable culture and lifestyle. Too bad.
Pass the popcorn.
P.S. They also have no idea how close to death they are.
“Russia’s government has just announced that it has developed a new “bleeding edge” missile technology that would make the hundreds of billions in dollars that the USA has spent on encircling Russia (and China) with BMD installations utterly worthless. It’s a new ultra-advanced ICBM called RS-26.
Russia’s advanced RS-26 intercontinental ballistic missile has a range of 11,000 km. For illustration, Washington DC is 7843 kilometers from Moscow. The new RS-26 also is capable of a continuously changing trajectory, meaning that it can penetrate even the most advanced missile defense shields. According to a report in the Chinese media after their military leaders were shown a demonstration, even though it weighs just 80 tons, compared to the 120-ton RS-24 Yars predecessor, the Rubezh loads a frightening 1,2 megatons into its four 300 kiloton warheads. Moreover, its booster stage is under five minutes, which means that NATO radars in Europe will have no time to register the launch.
Adding to NATO BMD problems, during the descending section of its trajectory, at only a few hundred kilometers to the target, the missile’s warheads suddenly take a dive, lose altitude, and continue the approach as a cruise missile.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/03/22/washington-kiss-your-silly-missile-defense-goodbye/
And the wars drums beat on…
Plantagenet on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 7:57 pm
@Harquebus
Thanks for the link to Pilger’s website. You are right—his work is excellent.
I especially enjoyed this essay at Pilger’s website: http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue
Cheers!
GregT on Wed, 23rd Mar 2016 9:44 pm
You should read the article that you linked to planter, instead of being simply mesmerized by the picture of Obama.
You are correct, his work is excellent.
” It was Nuland who masterminded the coup in Kiev. The wife of Robert D. Kagan, a leading “neo-con” luminary and co-founder of the extreme right wing Project for a New American Century, she was foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney. ”
“Nuland’s coup did not go to plan. Nato was prevented from seizing Russia’s historic, legitimate, warm-water naval base in Crimea. The mostly Russian population of Crimea – illegally annexed to Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev in 1954 – voted overwhelmingly to return to Russia, as they had done in the 1990s. The referendum was voluntary, popular and internationally observed. There was no invasion.”
“At the same time, the Kiev regime turned on the ethnic Russian population in the east with the ferocity of ethnic cleansing. Deploying neo-Nazi militias in the manner of the Waffen-SS, they bombed and laid to siege cities and towns. They used mass starvation as a weapon, cutting off electricity, freezing bank accounts, stopping social security and pensions. More than a million refugees fled across the border into Russia. In the western media, they became unpeople escaping “the violence” caused by the “Russian invasion”. “
joe on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 1:18 am
I just wish they would get on with it then. Bunch of cowards, posturing, getting proxies to do their work, its all games to them.
Lets have Armageddon, its gonna happen anyway, either when the bumpy plateau peak oil is done or when 40 million muslims rise up in Europe. Yes 40 million! People sick and tired of watching people like Bush commit warcrime.
So lets see who the real men are. I can meet God anytime they like.
Harquebus on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 3:08 am
Plantagenet.
You are welcome.
Cheers.
theedrich on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 3:25 am
“Most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.”
Why not add Franklin D. Roosevelt to this list? He was the one who destroyed Europe in WW II, the “good war” that liberals and Jews love so much. And there was also the Demonic Party’s Woodrow Wilson before him, who actually began the demise of Europe and Western civilization with WW I, the “war to end all wars.”
Hotflash Clitory will be the one to take us into WW III as a nuclear one. Pilger says of Austrialia that “[t]he government of Malcolm Turnbull has just announced a so-called defence budget of $195 billion that is a drive to war.” That sum, however, pales in comparison with the amount of $600 billion in perpetuity that U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter is asking Congress for. It blows the mind to realize that all of this madness is taking place in an atmosphere of calm, ostensibly rational discussion before the democratically elected representatives of the people in staid D.C. auditoriums. In effect, it amounts to a calm, rational, deliberate discussion about how best to commit suicide.
In effect, the argument against Trump boils down to the fact that he is not politically correct, since so many groups (and lobbyists and corporate interests) are offended by his remarks. He wants less foreign intervention, a stop to illegal immigration and drug imports from abroad, and even a less hostile relationship with Russia and China. Such “isolationism” cannot be tolerated. So the masses will choose the end of civilization by electing Hotflash. After all, they would not want to be considered racist.
yoananda on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 3:37 am
It’s called entropy growing.
Nobody know’s where WE are going.
Anonymous on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 4:52 am
The american empire has been waging war against the Earth, its ‘enemies, its own ‘allies’ when it advances its goals, and even its own people, since its inception. Only a relatively brief period when media manipulation was strongest(pre-internet), AND while a uS had a relatively small population was busy gorging itself on the resources pilfered at gunpoint(or FTA) of the rest of world, could it make fatuous claims about being ‘the indispensable nation’, stick.
Most people outside the empire never believed any of it, though a few do, even to this day. More people understand clearly now, the uS empire is a permanent war and death economy. But a great many still think of the uS as some kind of peace-loving utopia(LoL), that can only make ‘mistakes’, but is essentially blameless and innocent in most all other cases.
The author is right. The uS IS waging war, because it has ALWAYS been waging war. It never stopped, or stops waging war. If the uS wasn’t waging war against the very Earth itself, or its peoples to steal their resources, americans likely would not know what to with themselves.
Dredd on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 4:52 am
Yep.
Evolution for all (Evolution From Left To Right – 7).).
Davy on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 1:00 pm
Sounds like a mad rush for the door over in the Middle Kingdom.
“back of the envelope” calculations, fully one-third of all Vancouver real estate purchased in Vancouver last year was bought by Chinese investors.”
“Chinese investors spent about C$12.7 billion ($9.6 billion) on real estate in the western Canadian city in 2015, or 33 percent of its C$38.5 billion in total sales,”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-24/chinese-take-over-canadas-real-estate-market-buy-one-third-all-vancouver-homes-sold-
PracticalMaina on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 1:13 pm
Davy they are just spending their reserves to keep the wheels on the global economy. 1/3 of all expenditure on renewable power in 2015 was done by China, about 104 billion by that country alone.
I had a relative in the Navy who was made to watch these tests. He said some of the sailors got protective glasses, the rest were told to turn away and cover their eyes. The x-ray effect was strong enough that he could see his forearm bones.
Why are the bravest men and always made to suffer. Firefighters are exposed to dangerous carcinogenic chemical fire retardants in the smoke of house fires, we expose our soldiers to everything under the sun, even farming and fishing, providing the world with food, are statistically very dangerous.
energy investor on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 4:24 pm
I haven’t checked out John Pilger’s bio, but because he is a fellow kiwi, I have known of him and read his articles for 30 to 40 years.
He started out as a photo journalist covering disasters and wars and became disenchanted with the “on the ground” administration of US foreign policy…one attrocity after another.
He is often marginalised within mainstream media circles because he is so blunt. But that doesn’t mean he is wrong.
No empire can exist without weilding the power of life and death in arbitrary fashion. We all benefit from the current version of Pax Americana and the possible alternatives that I can think of, all seem pretty daunting.
If John were Chinese or Russian, he would already be dead.
Regretfully, because he has such a following, I suspect he could eventually have some sort of accident that silences him. But whoever instigates that would need to leave no trace.
I admire John and always read what he writes.
makati1 on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 9:01 pm
Energy, I think if you ask the 6+ billion who are NOT Westerners, you would NOT assume that ‘everyone’ benefits from the Imperial Fist. The human world existed for at least 12,000 years before the Us Imperial war machine cranked up. The last 100 years have not been a plus in most of the world because of that event.
But then, old dogs sometimes cannot learn new tricks … or see reality.
danny on Thu, 24th Mar 2016 10:28 pm
There have been ‘backpack bombs” since before the korean war that could destroy an entire city!! Where has this guy been under a rock!!!
GregT on Fri, 25th Mar 2016 12:36 am
“There have been ‘backpack bombs” since before the korean war that could destroy an entire city!!”
Thanks for the info danny boy. Provide credible links please. Otherwise you are full of shit.
Davy on Fri, 25th Mar 2016 7:17 am
There are small NUKs that can be shot out of a cannon or carried in a big back pack but they will not destroy a city. They can destroy a town and make a mess for the surrounding areas. The best way to destroy part of a larger city is by the air with a biggish NUK detonated at the proper altitude. There are plenty of sources to google and there is a site where you can plug in the location and it will show what a NUK will destroy. You can plug in the type of NUK you prefer. There was a huge Russian NUK produced that was awesome in size but not practical in use. Today the trend in NUKs is in accuracy and sized towards the desired goals. It is about avoiding being destroyed before use then when applied it is applied towards overwhelming effect in a small delivery system. They call them MIRVs. It is also about reliability. I have read that reliability is increasingly and issue because of age of the existing NUK arsenal. This is why testing is so important. Today the major powers are using super computers to determine the reliability instead of physical testing. It is not as good but avoids the mess.